Honest Aulus Cornelius, who had sat in this very room and made him swear he was innocent of murder. Could he have admitted that he had hired the thugs who stabbed and mutilated Tiberius Livonius, a tribune whose person was supposed to be inviolate? No, he could not, any more than he could admit to a living soul that the son he so cherished was not his own, but the fruit of a liaison between his late wife and his own body slave, a man called Ragas, who, physically strong and a fine boxer, had protected Lucius in the streets of a city where violence was commonplace. That was his secret and his alone; his thugs had taken care of that slave on the same night as they had taken care of Livonius. It was an unforeseen bonus that his wife, a woman he had come to despise for her simpering infidelity, in giving birth to Marcellus, had also expired on the night of his birth.
Three very necessary deaths on one night, the Feast of Lupercalia. That killing of the plebeian tribune had been essential to stop the tide of reforms the man proposed, extending citizenship to Rome’s Italian allies, changing the voting structure in the Comitia in a way that would dent senatorial rule, all this to diminish the power of the Optimates. Even worse was the idea of allowing the Equites the right to sit in judgement in the courts. The class of knights would use that power for only one purpose: against the patricians whose families had led Rome to the greatness she now enjoyed. Empires, Lucius knew, were fragile. There had been many before and they had fallen, to his mind for only one reason: the power of the state had been diluted, so that political infighting replaced firm central rule.
With a start, Lucius realised he had allowed his mind to wander, to think on things that were past and unalterable. Now mattered, not yesterday or the day before, so he turned to the other scrolls that made up the despatches. The road-building senator, Licinius Domitius, was engaged in the last sections of the road that would run all the way from Rome to Iberia, thus helping to keep that province under control. He was experiencing some difficulty in bridging, at a point near the delta, the great river that ran south from the Alps to the Greek city of Massila; more time, slaves and money would be required. There was a hint of trouble on the border with Numidia where the sons of a client king were competing for the succession and causing trouble, but the Ionian coast was quiet and prosperous, as was the whole of Greece. There was the usual nuisance of the Alpine tribes north of the River Po in Gallia Cisalpina, but the biggest problem was, and remained, Spain, and in particular the chieftain called Brennos.
It was telling how often, in these last ten years, that name had come up in the affairs of both the state and his own life, first when he had read Aulus’s early despatches from Spain, in which the man had come close, having caught the legions strung out on the march, to winning a major battle. The modesty with which his old friend had explained how he had mastered a desperate situation was still vivid in his mind — he had not, for instance, made any mention of the capture of Claudia. Despite Aulus’s warnings, following on from that campaign, Lucius had seen him as a defeated foe, albeit not a dead one, going so far as to describe the man as a flea. But he was beginning to realise that this chieftain had grown to become first a gnat with a painful sting, before a metamorphosis in his power had turned him into a fully grown and dangerous spider.
It was startling just how much Rome knew about Brennos; not where he came from precisely or why, but what he had achieved since he first appeared on the Roman border. He had, against all the odds and previous experience, united the tribes that lived cheek by jowl with Rome and so very nearly turned them into a successful army. Beaten by Aulus the man had retired into the west, first to the lands of Lusitani, which bordered the great outer sea, and, once obliged to move on from there, to other tribal areas, all the time using his status as a Druid. That gained him hospitality and trust at every hearth, a trust which he abused by seeking to seduce the younger warriors from allegiance to their tribal elders.
Finally he came upon the Duncani, a tribe in decline, and there he stayed, becoming a companion to the elderly chieftain, Vertogani, a man much given to three major faults: drinking, boasting and limitless procreation. Once a great warrior, the man was old and enfeebled by his passions. He had also bred too many sons who hankered to succeed him, each of whom had been given part of the tribal lands as their own fiefdoms. These sons had not only disputed amongst themselves but sought alliances with neighbouring chieftains, foolish because such neighbours sought only one thing: Duncani territory. Many a descendant, cheated by those who had professed to be their friends, had to be allowed back into the family fold, forgiven for their stupidity.
It only emerged later that the weaknesses which this created, especially the rivalry to succeed Vertogani, were the factors that attracted Brennos, that and the location of the tribes’ hill-fort. Numantia was a place of natural defence high on a bluff overlooking the confluence of two rivers. In order to gain control of that Brennos had cast off his Druid vows of celibacy, married Vertogani’s favourite daughter, then proceeded to murder as many of the man’s sons as were foolish enough to stay within reach. The wiser offspring, seeing that their father was in thrall to this interloper and wishing to stay alive, left before Vertogani died, to become a source of much of the information Rome had acquired.
First Brennos had taken back land that had been lost, before reducing the neighbouring tribes to clients rather than rivals. As his authority spread he became the dominant force in the interior, and at the same time the fortress of Numantia grew more and more formidable. Brennos, now the undisputed Duncani chieftain, had added ring after ring of outworks to his defences. Not that he, according to the reports, trusted to the landscape. Great trenches had been dug in front of the bluff walls to double the scaling height, the ramparts were faced with wood to make a frame filled with loose stones and great earth bastions stood behind these, so that Numantia was impervious to attack by fire.
The central area, sacred home to the original tribe, had been kept free to act as a place of worship and assembly. The small wooden temple, dedicated to the Earth God, Dagda, held the treasures of the tribe, much increased, it seemed, through the new chieftain’s efforts. The Greeks who traded with Brennos told of gold and silver objects set with precious stones, fetched out at all the festivals of the Celtic faith and placed around the altar. This, a circular stone, stood above the spring that gushed out of the earth, providing a source of water that could not be plugged from outside. Brennos anticipated a siege, since he paid as much attention to husbandry as he did to his defences. As recent nomads, the Celts were inclined to rear livestock to the exclusion of all other staples; he had them plough the earth to plant wheat, driving the men to work as well as the women. Great storehouses had been scooped out of the formidable rock, to hold the grain that would be necessary to withstand an attack.
His wife, Cara, was certainly fertile, giving birth annually, and for all that he had seen off the sons and heirs to the leadership of the tribe, his wife had a string of cousins and nephews, so that his personal household had grown to include the male members of that extended family, who acted as his bodyguards. Lucius stopped reading for a moment, his mind playing on an idea. Brennos was certainly dangerous; he encouraged other tribes to revolt, backed them with men, then broke off his support for the insurrection as soon as the Romans gathered in strength to oppose it. That left his clients exposed. Even the Lusitani, hitherto cautious of troubling Rome, had taken to carrying out pirate raids on both sides of the Pillars of Hercules with their small galleys. Given their strength and location, that was something to which Rome found it difficult to respond.
Perhaps the way to deal with Brennos was to emulate his own rise to prominence; to encourage another male member of the tribe to supplant him, either by subterfuge or force. Lucius expected little from other chieftains. Those tribes closest to him who were not actually under his heel treated him with respect, even if they failed to acknowledge his leadership. The same men who gave Rome information about the Duncani provided them with intelligence about their neighbours. If anything, the reports coming out of these encampments were even more specific. Brennos was given to predicting that one day they would succumb to him, not through fear but through respect.
Masugori, one tribal chieftain who had made and kept his peace with Rome, was quite open about his neighbour’s aims. The Duncani chieftain claimed that all he needed was a Roman army, with a general foolish enough and greedy enough to venture far beyond the limits of Latin power. Once they had been lured into the forbidding interior fastness of high plateaus and deep valleys, Brennos could inflict on them certain destruction. Let the fame and wealth of Numantia spread across the Iberian Peninsula; let it be known that there was another power as great as the Roman Republic.
He laid aside the scroll with a grim smile; everything that Brennos did to create a war fell flat. It must seem, to him, like lethargy, but it was quite the opposite. It was sound tactical sense for an empire which had time on its side. Yes, Rome would fight the tribes closest to them, in response to the raids he initiated, and reduce them till their only hope of survival was to sue for peace, but they would not come inland to attack him or any of the other hill-forts, like Pallentia, which they would be bound to consider a threat to their communications. The thought he had had earlier was fully formed now; in the absence of an enemy to fight, let the people of Numantia, with a little encouragement from Rome, indulge in intrigue, directed at the only source of power, Brennos himself!
